Delta Compression for Linux Security Patches?

Posted by Cliff on Friday September 3, 2004 @01:45PM from the binary-diffs dept.

cperciva asks: "For people without fast internet connections, it is often impractical to download large security patches. In order to avoid to reduce patch sizes, some operating systems -- starting with FreeBSD over a year ago, and recently followed by Mac OS X and Windows XP SP2 -- have started to use delta compression (also known as binary diffs, which constitutes a portion of my doctoral thesis), and can often reduce patch sizes by over a factor of 50. In light of the obvious benefits, I have to ask: When will Linux vendors follow suit?"

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Gentoo Portage by WamBamBoozle · 2004-09-03 14:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

I wonder why Gentoo doesn't do this. Gentoo, as far as I can tell, always distributes a bzip2'ed tar of any particular distribution.
It works beautifully but I can't help but think it is a waste of bandwidth.